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Mental Health
It may not be obvious, but Idaho -- like the rest of the United States -- has a
serious mental illness problem.
About 1.1% of the adult population of the U.S. has schizophrenia; another
2.6% suffers from bipolar disorder.
About 6.7% of adults suffer from major depression.
Unfortunately, many of these problems -- which for schizophrenia alone costs the United States more than $58 billion a year
in disability checks and medical care -- are not being adequately addressed.
Some of the problem is that in the 1960s, America's elites decided to
scrap our public mental hospital system, convinced that people with severe
mental illness would do just fine outside a hospital. Some of them did;
but many of the others became homeless persons living under bridges, begging
for money in big cities, dying of tuberculosis, malnutrition, and often
freezing to death.
More frightening, a small number of these mentally ill persons end up as ugly headlines -- even here in Idaho.
What needs to be done:
- There is a shortage of public hospital beds for the mentally ill. While the
state does use private mental hospitals to fill the gaps, my goal is to make
sure that there is sufficient capacity throughout the state. And yes, this is
going to cost some money. Cleaning up dead bodies and dealing with homelessness
isn't cheap, either.
- In the rural counties, there simply are no facilities to hold mentally ill
people over the weekend while waiting for a court hearing. This means that if
the police arrest a person who is mentally ill and a danger to himself or others
on Saturday, they have to transport that patient three hours across Idaho on Saturday,
back again on Monday morning for a hearing before a judge, and then (usually)
back to the hospital after the hearing. That adds up quickly.
Some counties can't afford this, and the mentally ill sometimes are just ignored --
which is bad for them, and often bad for the rest of us. A few counties in the past were
reduced to handcuffing such patients to a desk in the police station. That should
bother all of us -- these are our children, our siblings, our friends, our neighbors.
My goal is to see that at least some of the existing general hospitals throughout
the state have at least a couple of beds that meet the requirements for a locked
psychiatric ward so that we don't have to ship someone who is mentally back and forth
across the state. This isn't going to be cheap. Neither is paying for three ambulance
trips from Emmett to Blackfoot (where the southern state mental hospital is located)
as recently happened.
- I am concerned about the failures of the existing system to adequately deal with
mentally ill people who are showing signs that they may turn violent. Jason Hamilton
told psychologists evaluating him after a suicide attempt that next time he would use
guns or bombs and "take a whole bunch of people with him." And that's exactly what he
did, three months later, shooting up Moscow, Idaho. This isn't the only example of a
system that seems to have failed to protect the public, and failed to care for the
mentally ill. My goal is for the legislature to investigate what has gone wrong, and
what we can do to fix it. A mentally ill person shouldn't have to become a tragic
news story before they get help.
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